Electrical signal processing apparatus including apparatus for analyzing multi bit binary coded ditital signals, is known including devices where a number of processing elements are provided on a single chip device such as an integrated circuit silicon chip. Such apparatus may require high speed sampling of data and difficulties arise when it is necessary to interconnect a number of such devices or chips in order to form a cascaded array. Electrical signals can be transferred more quickly in on-chip communication than off-chip communication which is necessary when data is communicated through a number of interconnected chips. Due to the small physical size of integrated circuits chips limited space is available for output and input pins to effect interchip connections and this can raise further difficulties in attempting to overcome slower off-chip communication in synchronous systolic arrays of processing elements partitioned across multiple devices when they are arranged to effect high frequency data sampling.
It is an object of the present invention to provide multistage electrical signal processing apparatus with improved inter device connection for use in synchronous systolic arrays having processing elements distributed across a plurality of devices.